Breadcrumb

John Ackerman

John M. Ackerman is an associate professor of Communication in the rhetoric area, where he teaches graduate courses on material and public space, social technologies and participatory design.

His scholarship attends to cultural and economic change in late-industrial neighborhoods. His fieldwork is situated in the industrial northeast and most recently in Boulder and the Front Range and framed by the idea of resilient communities. He brings qualitative and critical methods to bear on how economic performance, collective memory and material circulation help to constitute a vibrant community.

Currently he is also the associate director for Sustainability and Residential Learning in the Program for Writing and Rhetoric (PWR) in CU-Boulder’s College of Arts and Sciences. Through the PWR, he has helped to establish a sustainability curriculum, outreach to Boulder city and county, and to strengthen the program’s contribution to retention. He teaches in the Sustainability and Social Innovation Residential Academic Program.